# Spiritual Development and the Crisis of Materialistic Thought

## GA 190 — 23 March 1919, Dornach

### Lecture III

Today we want to point out some facts of the supersensible life, which can prove to you from a special point of view, how important and more and more significant it becomes for the evaluation of what happens here in the physical world, to look at the supersensible, superphysical processes which are always connected with the physical processes on earth. We are indeed at the end of an age and at the beginning of a new age, you know that something similar is said about every age. But this can be said of this expired and of the now beginning age in a completely different sense than of any earlier age. For we have events behind us, catastrophic events, of which mankind has become more and more aware that they have not been there in this intensity since historical life was recorded. The past age was one in which people here on earth cared as little as possible about the supersensible world. If you want to take such a matter very seriously, you must not confuse what one could call external church and lip service with a real orientation towards the supersensible world. It is not very difficult to see that what people have regarded for centuries as a certain religiousness is more an external thing, that it is not a real orientation towards the supersensible world. Until our days people have lived with a certain lack of concern for the supersensible world. And the change of the times demands from mankind today a reorientation towards the supersensible worlds. People must learn to look to these supersensible worlds again, but in a different way than is often imagined today. People want to stay with the ordinary comfortable belief that does not cost much inner effort. Those who have remained with this comfortable faith are the greatest enemies of true contemporary progress. The churches, which resist the new ways to supersensibility, are in truth already today the instigators that more and more materialistic and materialistic impulses are coming into mankind. It is necessary today to learn in a very concrete way to look into the supersensible worlds. We are standing in the age in which, for example, the great, tremendous change must take place, that the people become from thinking automatons to really thinking people. It is not true that it is terrible to say such a thing, because the people of today naturally consider themselves to be thinking people, and if you ask them to become thinking people first, they more or less consider it an insult. But it is nevertheless so. Since the middle of the 15th century, more and more people have become thinking automatons. People today, so to speak, leave themselves to the thoughts, they do not control the thoughts. Just think what it would mean if the same thing would happen to you with regard to other members of your organism, what happens to most people at present with regard to the organs of thought. Ask yourself whether today's man can be very inclined - I say can be - to begin arbitrarily with a thought, to conclude arbitrarily with a thought? Thoughts are bubbling through people's heads today. They can't resist them, they give themselves to them automatically. There one thought rises, the other goes away, that twitches and flashes through the head, and the people think in such a way that one could actually best say, it thinks in the people. Think if the same thing would happen to people with regard to their arms and legs, if they would control them just as little as they control their thinking. Think if a person would behave on the streets today with his arms as he behaves with his thinking organ! You can imagine all the thoughts that twitch through a man's head when he walks across the street, and now think that he would continually wave his hands and arms as he does with his thoughts, or even with his legs! And yet, before this epoch we stand, before which men must learn to have as much power over their thoughts, that is, more precisely, over their organs of thought, as they have power over their arms and legs. Man is entering this age. A certain inner discipline of thinking is that which is to take hold and from which people today are still quite far away.

We have entered the fifth post-Atlantean period since the middle of the 15th century. Before this period expires, people have to learn to control their thinking as well as their arms and legs. Then the real task of this fifth post-Atlantean period will be accomplished for those people who can do it. You see, it is a matter of seriousness if one wants to consider that which, so to speak, is coming up on the horizon of the development of mankind in the present age. Now, however, with what I have just indicated, something essentially different will be connected with this mastering of thinking. The more people begin to master thinking, the more they will be able to imagine, to have imaginations. And imaginations are needed by people, because only through them can the social instincts develop into the anti-social instincts that are so often at work today, so that through imaginations people gain the ability to really put themselves in the place of other people, of their fellow human beings. One cannot put oneself in the place of one's fellow human beings by mere abstract thinking. Abstract thinking makes people stubborn, abstract thinking makes them listen only to their own opinions. And above all, abstract thinking causes man to shut himself off more or less from that mobility which one needs in order to be able to live with the spiritual world. That one cannot easily live with the spiritual world today, you can see from a very specific phenomenon, which is extraordinarily frequent today.

You see, for example, our "Appeal" has now gone through the world. It has been understood by a number of people - that is obvious. Everywhere in the world people have found themselves here or there who have understood it. But a whole number of other people have admittedly not been able to understand him. It is even difficult to imagine what that means, one does not understand the call, because there is nothing in it that actually every person could not understand from the beginning. Yet many find it incomprehensible. Where does this come from? It comes from the fact that today the real spiritual education has reached an extraordinary low level, because people are no longer able to keep up with thoughts that interrupt their thought automatism. People today are accustomed to automatically follow the thoughts once they get going. Just observe the typical people of the present, you will be able to tell them golden things - if then the people themselves are to say something, again that rolls off, what they are used to say since childhood. To put new thoughts into the heads of the people, that becomes extraordinarily difficult today. Whoever has a little bit of life experience, as a rule, always knows what most people will say to one thing or another that appears in the world today. That's how automatic people's judgments have become, how automatic their thoughts have become. Thought automatism is what interferes most with what is demanded of people today by the forces of development. People like formulas, they like what they are used to. The further you go westward, the more you hear, when some sentence is coined: Yes, you can't say that! - How often people say, when something German, for example, has to be translated into Dutch or English or French: That's not English, that's not Dutch, that's not French! - The reverse cannot be said. In German, everything is possible. You can put the predicate at the beginning, in the middle, at the end - it is always German. One can hardly use the expression that a way of speaking is not German in the sense of saying that something is not Dutch, not English, not French, and so on. Certainly, there are certain habits of thought that express themselves in the sequence of sentences; but one can just as well use another sequence of sentences than the one that is written in the grammar. There is actually nothing wrong in this respect, and it is only a philistrosis, a philistinism, if there is often talk of the false and the incorrect. The automatism of thinking is often expressed very clearly in language. People today should be attentive to such nuances of life, because such nuances are extremely important for the understanding of our time. So, when the automatism of thinking ceases and the mobility of thinking takes place again, the possibility of imagination will be awakened in the souls of men.

One more thing will have to be fought, and that is the ignorance of our age. The ignorance of our age is extraordinarily great. People do not understand all kinds of things, simply because they do not fit into their automatic thinking. Preachers are usually found so generally comprehensible, because they basically say nothing else than what has been purred off countless times in the thinking automatisms of the listeners. People find it especially nice when they can think like that inside: Oh, what he says, I have always said inwardly - haven't I said it? - How often do we hear this saying today, and how aptly do we find that of which we can say: Didn't I say it myself? - It is hardly necessary to hear what one has already said oneself. It is quite a waste of life if one always wants to listen to what one has already said oneself. However, one does not have it so comfortable when listening to the spiritual-scientific. Most people cannot tell themselves that they have already said it themselves. And because it does not fit into the thinking automatism, people today find it so difficult to understand. The most uneducated people today are often in the very circles where you would least look for them. The specialization of science has led to a situation in which scientists are plowing a certain field. They drill into it with their automatic thinking, and they are often the most uneducated people. Today we have university professors who actually cannot understand the simplest things, who are really the most uneducated people, about whose uneducation one is deceived only because they so often say: Such a thing is too little popular for the people! - One hears such things also in other fields. How often one can hear, for example, from theater directors of our big cities: One must give more generally understandable things, otherwise the people do not understand. - Mostly, this is based on the fact that the theater directors themselves do not understand better, while the people who go to the theater would actually be happy if they were offered something different. It is necessary to look a little bit at the background, if one wants to understand our time in that, in which it is necessary to continue this time a little bit.

All these things are important for gaining a judgment about what can contribute so that people come to the imaginations so necessary for social life. When these imaginations gradually appear in the souls of men, then these souls will get into a mood which will find it unbearable to know that spiritual life, education, school system, university system are dependent on the state order or on the economic order.

A time will come when the imaginations of individuals will be so strong that these people will feel, within a spiritual life ordered according to state or economic conditions, like a man who is bound and confined to a track so that he can move in only one direction. The people who develop imaginations will feel fettered in the education which depends on the state and economic life and which is considered as the ideal today. The forces of development of the time are strongly speaking in this respect, my dear friends. If today's conditions were to continue, there would gradually be a strong discrepancy, a disagreement, between what people demand in terms of free spiritual life through the external condition of their souls, and what would be there if all education were constricted to state conditions. Perhaps it is only a caricature of a forerunner, when in individual cities of Central and Eastern Europe the schoolboys and schoolgirls expedite the educators and elect the board members from their own ranks, but it is a mood that cannot be overlooked, a mood that goes to the point of discarding that which must not be allowed to continue. It is such a weather light of a new time, which one must not only condemn, which one should already understand a little correctly in its impulses. That is one thing. People will be more and more dependent on having a free spiritual life. Why? Because in the fifth post-Atlantean age we are approaching a sensuous-supersensuous arrangement of the world, in which those spirits of the higher hierarchies, whom we call Angeloi, descend deeper than before, enter into a much more intimate communion with men than was the case before. The relations between the sensual and the supersensual world are to become more intimate from the present age. People shall not only receive the rain from the clouds, but they shall also learn to perceive from higher regions the inspirations of the angels mingling more and more among the souls of men.

In this way the spiritual life which is liberated will indeed become one which, through freedom of thought, will receive that which comes down as influences from a supersensible world. To establish a spiritual life built on itself, emancipated from the life of the state and the economy, is not an external program; it is something that must be learned in connection with the inner forces of human life that continue to develop mankind. Therefore one can say: If one demands such a social orientation, as it is striven for by our threefolding, one does not demand something in the sense of a program, but something which is demanded by the revelations of the spiritual world, which will speak ever more clearly and distinctly to mankind, and which will at the same time tell how mankind lives itself into its ruin, into morbid conditions, if it does not want to hear that which reveals itself out of supersensible worlds for the salvation, for the recovery of mankind. And apart from the fact that the angels in this way get involved in more intimate fellowship with the people - in Middle Germany this getting involved of noblemen with people of the people is called "making oneself common", thus the angels will make themselves common in the future -, also the archangels will do this. There will be other impulses; even if they will speak much more quietly, if they will speak like silent inspirations, they will come, these inspirations. And these inspirations will in the future establish the inner substance of the future states, which on the one hand will have established the spiritual life, on the other hand the economic life, which are therefore real states under the rule of law, established on their own. The states which were founded, for example, in the third post-Atlantean, in the Egyptian-Chaldean age, can be called theocratic, just as the old Hebrew state can be called a theocracy. But these theocracies have gradually disappeared. Theocracies, however, shall again come to earth. In the earthly legal life one should feel the rule of the archangels. We have said that the opposite of the supersensible life of man is expressed in the legal life. But in this legal life, which is the most unspiritual as it lives on earth, the guidance and direction of the archangels, the Archangeloi, who are again becoming more intimate with man, should mingle.

And the spirits of time will become the bearers, the administrators of the economic cycle of man, they will rule more and more in the economic life, when this economic life will be really organized. An associative life it will become. Since the middle of the 15th century, people have developed a tendency to look only at the production of goods, at the accumulation of goods, at profiting. A reversal is necessary. In the future, when the economic cycle will be self-sufficient, it will be much more important to distribute goods among people and to consume goods. Associations will be formed, which in turn will regulate production after consumption. If a sparse beginning is made with such a thing today, it will be little understood or impaired by other impulses today.

Just think how we tried some time ago to bring bread among the people by not producing in a blind way from one place and then putting that on the market, but by asking consumers, who were to be recruited from the Anthroposophical Society, to take the bread. That would have been a consumer cooperative, which would have been supplied in this way from a certain place. At one point the abstract principle of supply and demand would have been overcome. There would have been carried out in another way, as it must come more and more, the principle that is produced to the extent that can be consumed. This is the only sound principle of national economy. But as I said, today such things are still difficult to implement on a small scale. But this is what we must strive for in economic life. Social democracy expresses this in the words: Until now, production has been for profit; in the future, production must be for consumption. But the way social democracy wants to realize this principle would lead to a paralysis of the real social organism. The principle is justified, but it is not yet thought of today in the sense in which it can be realized for the salvation of the social organism.

Thus, out of that which, I would like to say, flows towards us from the future: first, the necessity of independent spiritual life, through which the Angeloi make themselves more intimate with man; second, independent state life, through which the Archangeloi make themselves more intimate with man; third, independent economic life, through which the Archai make themselves more intimate with man. Thus the forces of development of mankind are approaching. The most rapid progress must be made in the independent spiritual life, for this, if mankind is not to meet with a great calamity, must be ready, that is, independent, by the end of the fifth post-Atlantean period. At the end of the sixth post-Atlantean period a new spiritual theocracy must be ready, independent, and at the end of the seventh post-Atlantean period a real social community must be fully formed, in which the individual would feel unhappy if all were not quite as happy as he, if the individual had to buy his happiness with privations from others. From other points of view we have already touched on these things several times.

From a spiritual-scientific point of view, one must see the supersensible development behind what one wants to demand for the development in the physical world. The time is just beginning when people will only see the sensual correctly when they see the supersensible. Above all, it is necessary for the understanding of the very near present that the view of the repeated earthly lives is not only understood in abstracto, but that it is comprehended quite concretely. If one merely knows that man goes from incarnation to incarnation with intervening lives in the purely spiritual world, then one knows only the abstract. One should not be satisfied with this. The knowledge of this abstract can give one a certain satisfaction, but practical for the world becomes only that knowledge which progresses to the concrete. Such a concrete knowledge, which is connected with the repeated earth lives, leads, for example, to the realization that there is a certain connection between the experiences that people have had here on earth, before they have passed through the death gate, and after-death experiences. After they have passed through the death gate, people actually continue in a certain way the life they led here until death, and what people have gone through on earth has a very strong effect when they have passed through the death gate. So think of it quite vividly: People go through the death gate, they bring with them into the supersensible world that which they have united with their souls here; that lives itself out there in a very, very real way. It is not indifferent what man, by passing through the death gate, takes with him into the spiritual world. For that which man takes into the spiritual world through the death gate becomes an important experience for those who shortly thereafter descend into physical life through birth. A kind of important, essential meeting takes place between those who died a while before that time and those who are born afterwards. Those who are born have important experiences with those who died shortly before. So to speak, how the earth was before these, who are coming up now, went through the death gate, this is not experienced, but experienced by those who are about to descend. They are also prepared in a certain way for their descent by what those who go through the death gate shortly before this descent bring up into the spiritual world.

We have passed through a very materialistic age. Until 1913, a large part of mankind left this world through death in a certain thoughtless acceptance of material interests. Until 1913, 1914, by far the majority of people did not enter the spiritual world very much. There were souls in the spiritual world who saw these arrivals. The souls who were to descend later, in 1914, 1915, 1916, 1917, saw these arrivals come up with the soul remnants of the materialistic age. This has been transformed in these souls into a terrible longing.

You see, this is the peculiarity of the children who have been born since the year 1912 or 1913, that they carry the remnants in their childlike soul life, in their smiles, in their tears, that they carry the remnants in their childlike soul life of a longing which they went through before they descended through birth into earthly existence. And this longing has been transplanted into them by the people who have come up. They have brought up little spiritual. This terrible lack of spiritual things, which people have brought up into the spiritual worlds in this time, has caused in a large number of children, who have already been born since 1914, or who will be born in the next years, the longing not to find again the conditions on earth, which those have left, who have thus ascended.

At the bottom of the life of the present time, one saw a strange force emanating from those who wanted to be born. One can express this force as the longing to wipe away that which has gradually accumulated in materialism on earth. Of course, such forces which work in such an intensive way in a certain direction, as they come into discrepancy with other forces, can be used by all kinds of Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers in this or that direction. But think out what I have just said, and you have one of the backgrounds lying behind the sensual phenomena: The longing to wipe away the more and more materializing time. There you have one of the forces which strives for the annihilation of this age which is becoming more and more materialistic. One can say: Among the forces which have worked in the development of mankind, even if out of a deep tragedy, for the destruction of the culture swimming into the more and more material, among these forces are the longings of the children who have been born since the year 1913. They have not wanted to appear in a world that offers the continuation of what has been since then.

This is the other side of the desolate destruction that has occurred, this is the other side of the call to learn from the contemplation of the materialism of the past age. This is the impulse that should pour into our longing for real socialization. Thus we must understand our time from the supersensible facts, must strive more and more not to stop in the sensual, but to ask: What supersensible forces play into the sensual life? - A great call goes through this age from the supersensible worlds. At the end of the seventies, behind this sensuous world, the victory of Michael over those powers which I have often characterized to you took place. Thirty-five years men were allowed to live, until the year 1914; in this middle of their lives the crisis had to break in. For if no crisis had come, even those who were born at the end of the seventies and had got beyond the middle of life would have become more and more rigid in the automatism of thought which, because it is an automatism,

is banished to the physical life. Henceforth, these thirty-five-year-olds were not allowed to continue in the same state of the age. Those who are born since then, on the one hand they have to look tragically to the destruction of that into which their fathers and their mothers lived, but for their total soul life it is better that way. The others, however, lack to understand the necessity that supersensible worlds command the turning back from all that people have considered as the modern civilization, and the living in spiritual worlds. Yes, my dear friends, it is the spirit that demands understanding from us for a new dawning age. Those people alone will be able to contribute something to the further development of humanity who do not ignore this call of the spirit. Let us speak this loudly within ourselves. Then alone are we in reality inside what the anthroposophical spiritual movement should be and alone can want.

We will continue to speak about this next Friday at seven o'clock.